When I recall age 18, the year 1996 and college, my mind whips arounds across a lot of music. Television's Greatest Hits, Vol 6, Remote Control is unavailable on Spotify, but it is listed on discogs.com. For me, the track that SHOULD NOT BE PLAYED by an 18-year-old is the opening to Hardcastle & McCormick. I'd whip around campus with my standard transmission in those days!

I'd walk into the University Center and pass the music kiosk. This was in the age when they sold cigarette packs in the snack machines in its basement next to the pool hall (the place where I blew off Honors English). And yes, you could get a cup of hot coffee from a machine over in the business building from a vending machine with a fake wood veneer. Along with featuring Nada Surf's album with Popular, the kiosk echoed Press Play off of the Stone Temple Pilots' Tiny Music...Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop, a song that was a subtle introduction to the start of something very new.

These were before the days of MP3s, although if I were to believe this article, this first MP3 (it was all unlicensed in those days) was on August 10, 1996. While I downloaded a treasure trove of MIDI files in '96, I think across my first MP3 was when I ran across a website linking Garth Brooks in either late '97 or early '98? I was blown away at its relative small file size, for at the time, I had downloaded bits and pieces of WAV file, an eclectic collection of movie quotations. And again, this was in an era before broadband—heck, it was even before the 56k modem! My virtual world was bridged by a 33.6k modem. To place it the culture's larger context, I began burning my mix CDs before Napster was released in '99. And yes, I was among the 250,000 or so banned by Napster for downloading Metallica (I owned all of their studio albums on CD at that point; the Napster fix was easy: just delete the registry key and create a new account). But, that was the era, an era of Reality Bites.

It was an age where broadband speeds weren't in our pocket, rather I spent hours on the university network. I'd log into a VAX terminal to access my email with a password that had to be exactly 6 characters: (picard and ltdata).

And yes, I had a presence on the Internet in those days, a homepage off of WBS chat in '96. It featured a MIDI playing of Who Wants to Live Forever and my high school senior year portrait, the same that was kept by the photographer as an example of their work (I guess it didn't feature my double Windsor knotted Picard tie).

Today marks that wonderful month of Christmas & New Year's Eve, my favorite holidays of the year! It is both a month-long celebration and a time for strategy! I thought I'd whip up a list to rank my favorite Christmas movies of all-time, movies I watch each year:

1. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) - There's just a delightful spirit of adventure and self-reliance, a kid version of Into the Wild.
2. Home Alone (1990) - Just the classic gateway to every Christmas season.
3. Elf (2003) - It's the Napoleon Dynamite of the Christmas genre.
4. It's a Wonderful Life (1947) - I'm a sucker for What-If analysis.
5. The Family Man (2000) - (see #4)
6. A Christmas Story (1983) - It has that delightful, Scrubs meets The Wonder Years vibe.
7. Daddy's Home 2 (2017) - Family hijinks and buffoonery abound!
8. Four Christmases (2008) - (see #7)
9. National Lampoon Christmas Vacation (1989) - (see #7)
10. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) - It's quirky and just gets the introvert.

That said, shouldn't The Hobbit trilogy be considered a Christmas favorite? I totally could just let that run on repeat 24-7 as ambiance—it TOTALLY makes me long for my beard! Hey, there's snow (I think), well, it comes off more Christmas to me than Die Hard or Harry Potter. Well, at any rate, 2023 will be the year of the fantasy beard. For now, it's just the summer 'stache to be shaved on the Eve of 2023.

I now am the owner of roughly 40 lbs of chicken wings in the freezer, at a price of $52 from Gordon's. If my numbers are right, it's the arms off of 92 chickens! Or, in practical terms, 368 what people qualify as "wings" (I do love a good Hot Ones episode). My 6-quart Instant Vortex meat drawer really shines when I lay 7 full wings into it for 22 minutes at 400.

As I welcome all the goodness that bacon brings in my life, I begin to recall the reason why I had to go in 2020. I do a good job at slipping the sugar bacon, which tends to dominate the marketplace. Right now, I have bacon from Costco an Aldi's cured with exactly the same ingredients:

• Walter
• Salt
• Sodium phosphate
• Sodium erythorbate
• Sodium nitrate

I'm wary of sodium erythorbate. Apparently, it's used to cure faster and keep the pink color. But, what bugs me is that it is made from sugar sources like beet, sugarcane and corn. And maybe I might let that one go, but when I hear that sodium erythorbate is similar to Vitamin C, that makes me stop in my tracks for "glucose and vitamin C have a near-identical molecular structure and share the same pathways when absorbed into cells. When glucose and vitamin C compete, glucose wins out" (link).

Is bacon out of my life? Oh, cherished lover! I need your your lovin' butter! Throw on some Four Tops, 'cause, "(Bacon), I need your lovin'! Got to have all your lovin'!"

I have about 6 lbs of bacon left, but I don't know if we can go on together beyond 12 days. And I would totally be on board with pork belly, something I feasted on last Sunday. But from a utility perspective, I don't save its oil from the bottom of my meat drawer...the curing process makes bacon magical! Perhaps there will come a time I'll cure my own pork belly—by crankin' out the crunches!

And if there was one takeaway from that earlier discussion between Kelly Hogan and Stephanie Person, I do need the fat. I might return to ribeye fat. I have cranked up my butter with my coffee, but now I'm only doing my 3-cup of coffee Reduce brand stein of a mug with ice once a day, where I'll add 4 tbsps of butter and a package of gelatin.

But, is a butter stick better than bacon?

And finally, today's album, Weezer's blue album, was something I first heard in fall '95, when a teammate handed over a pair of headphones in the back of somebody's mom's station wagon while we were en route to a wrestling match (against Memphis Catholic, I believe). That sing-a-long CD was a mainstay in college for my '86 Toyota Celica, my '89 Ford Mustang convertible and my '93 Chevy Silverado extended cab with the step sides with the 12 CD disc chamber (I miss that truck). While It had the distortion of the era, it felt more like "me" than Nirvana as I approached the threshold from high school to college.

Today's post features not one, but TWO albums! The setting for these occurs after what I referenced the other day, Aerosmith Big Ones. However, it involves that same ol' black, 1979 Ford F-250 truck. Those nights were drives in a late autumn. The windows were quite literally rolled down while my cab remained toasty from the furnace that was a massive 460 cu in engine block. There were speaker boxes behind a bench seat reverberating the rock of Van Halen's 5150 and OU812.

The drive was a nightcap after the warm glow of the family-friendly country club, Casper Creek, an evening of shooting pool and dancing to songs from both a house band and hits like Shania Twain's (If You're Not in It for Love) I'm Outta Here and John Michael Montgomery's Sold (the Grundy County Incident).

I'm going to come off as Titanic's Rose, but it's been 27 years, and I can still smell the cigarettes at the front door, see the lights bounce off the darkened ceiling and feel the incandescence of the pool tables all beneath a dome of Desperately Wanting. At the end of the evening, I'd hit the door as the chill of the night sharpened my senses. My boots trampled grass and crunched gravel until I broke the silence of the night with my sole clanging with the power of Grayskull onto my truck's running board—my engine roared like the mighty Battlecat! As its headlamps shone through the Midnight Blue, the five ID lights at the crown of the beast popped on, my orange beacons of masculinity railing against the haze of darkness. As I thundered down those backroads with my Van Halen soundtracks, could life at 17 be any sweeter? Feels So Good.

And while I do not know if I can find a song more befitting of today's Carnivore, these lyrics are at the crossroad of today and yesteryear:

U.S. Prime, Grade A, stamped guaranteed
Grease it up, and turn on the heat
...
Hey, oh me, I been working up an appetite
It seems like the harder I work the more my body needs

Van Halen, Good Enough